In recent years, energy management systems (EMS) that manage energy consumption of equipment have attracted public attention. Examples of such energy management systems include a home energy management system (HEMS), a building energy management system (BEMS), a factory energy management system (FEMS), and a store energy management system (SEMS).
The energy management systems perform visualization, control, and the like, of energy consumption of individual equipment. For example, the energy management systems instruct reduction of energy consumption of individual equipment when the total energy consumption of the equipment exceeds a predetermined threshold value (e.g., see Patent Literature 1).
The energy management systems described above instruct reduction of energy consumption of the individual equipment when the total energy consumption of the individual equipment exceeds a predetermined threshold value (which will be referred to as automatic control hereinafter). Specifically, the automatic control forcibly changes control states of the equipment set by users. The automatic control is an effective control way to save energy, but not favorable for users in view of the quality of life (QoL). Thus, the automatic control has a trade-off relationship between the energy saving and the QoL.
Under such a background, users might cancel the automatic control to improve the QoL, but may fail to obtain sufficient energy-saving effects if the automatic control is limitlessly cancelled.